Mr. John McCallister:

It is good to see Dr. Farry. He served five years as the employment and learning minister. He knows some of the issues of trying to resolve or move issues such as that and how difficult it is. With regard to the petitions of concern, I accept Professor Tonge's earlier point that with numbers below 30, it is harder to trigger, but I would like to see a broader number of people being able to sign it, at least from two or three different parties or independents, whereby you have to build in and argue for support and it not just being triggered because you are greatly opposed to equal marriage. Even over contentious things such as abortion, had the Assembly acted on abortion when I was coming to the end of my time there - amendments were coming from Trevor Lunn and others - there would have been no need for Westminster or no pressure for it to do so. However, Dr. Farry is right on human rights issues and we are fortunate to have things such as the human rights commission, the equality commission, section 75 and things like that to do that. I do not know whether there would be confidence that the Assembly would necessarily address those issues.

Moving on to things such as a bill of rights, we have probably seen movement, albeit minor, on that over the past 18 months from the New Decade, New Approach. I agree with Dr. Farry's points around that. Were Alliance to do well in next year's elections, it would raise the question of how do you handle this large group of others with no designation. What would happen in respect of the posts of First Minister and deputy First Minister, or the First Ministers? I refer to all those issues. If we could get a period of stability and start drilling down and recognising the Assembly is probably much more level in numbers, we could get on with providing good government.